The grime of their lives

If there’s stuff that’s got to be said, it’s got to be said. Otherwise it’s just going to hide in the shadows

Jamal Edwards' online TV station, SB.TV, has had over 74m hits

At school he was disruptive, easily bored and, like many teenage boys growing up on west London’s hard-knock council estates, he got into fights.

One despairing teacher told him he would never achieve anything unless he knuckled down.

But as far as Jamal was concerned, he already was - just not academically. In his spare time he would film his friends rapping - “spitting”, they called it - on his mobile phone and post the results online. Soon, half the school was tuning in.

Six years on, at 21, Jamal is still hard at work. Only now nobody can deny his success.

His online TV station, SB.TV, has had over 74m hits and is turning over six figures. He may soon be worth much more.

This summer, he starred in a TV ad for Google Chrome, made by the advertising giant BBH.

He recently spent the day with Sir Richard Branson, “one of my inspirations”, to seek advice on how to turn his fast-rising business into an empire - he hopes to collaborate with the Virgin boss soon.

At parties he rubs shoulders with Beyonce, Gwyneth Paltrow and Sir Philip Green.

Such celebrity gloss is a world away from SB.TV’s gritty core content - which, more often than not, depicts life closer to the bottom of society than the top.

Grime is Britain’s answer to hip-hop. A music that evolved on inner-city council estates, hidden away from mainstream society, before emerging as the biggest source of new British talent.

Many of today’s chart-toppers - Dizzee Rascal, Plan B, Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk and (Prince William’s favourite) Tinie Tempah - began their careers making grime. Most are still in their early to mid-twenties. And now a new, even younger generation is making grime pay, too.

SB.TV offers vitality and controversy. Much of its content focuses on MCs filmed on the street, or in their estates, showboating their street-poetry skills.

This kind of delivery is known as “freestyle” - the music is added in the edit before broadcast. The grime MCs can thrill with their rapid-fire wordplay, there is wit and wisdom, but the lyrics can be brutal too, an oral history of Broken Britain.

Has Jamal ever felt the need to censor anyone?

“No, because it’s the voice of youth,” he says.

“If there’s stuff that’s got to be said, it’s got to be said. Otherwise it’s just going to hide in the shadows. It’s what’s happening now.

“So if someone’s talking about their life and that may involve violence, it’s better to vent it in music rather than go out there robbing people and selling drugs.”

After years of operating on a shoestring, Jamal is king of the castle, the Simon Cowell of grime, if you will.

As SB.TV has expanded, it has begun to feature pop stars too, such as Kelly Rowland, Justin Bieber and Pixie Lott.

Business is booming so fast even Jamal is struggling to keep up. He only recently turned 21. He uploaded a film of himself celebrating his birthday “and it got 12,000 views in two days”.

He still lives on the estate he grew up on, and says his success has inspired others - one friend is training to become a chef, others have gone back to college.

He wants to “remove the negative stereotyping” that “everyone” has of young people. I don’t think everyone thinks like that, I tell him. “Not everyone,” he concedes.

“But during the riots, whenever I stepped on a train people kept looking at me like I was going to do something. I specifically did not wear a hood. Or a hat - and I always wear a hat. I had no chains around my neck. But in the end I just decided to be myself.”

Days later we meet again in the cramped west London office of a music management company, where Jamal films a young MC, Mz Bratt, 23, who perches on a sofa to reel off the sassy, hard-nosed lyrics she wrote the previous evening.

Off-camera, Bratt is Cleopatra Humphrey, a pretty mixed-race girl from the not-so-pretty east London suburb of Hainault, who is much sweeter-natured than her moniker or lyrics might suggest.

She’s smart too - she was offered places to read English at Goldsmiths, King’s College and Queen Mary, but turned them all down to pursue music.

Like Jamal’s, Mz Bratt’s life of grime began at school. “I used to listen to pirate radio a lot - Deja Vu, Rinse FM, Dizzee Rascal, Wiley and Kano...”

She began posting self-recorded tracks on MySpace, and before long, grime producers were calling to work with her. Grime offers her a catharsis. “As Cleo, I’m very polite. You know how you are with your grandma and stuff? But the Mz Bratt part of me - I say whatever’s on my mind. And I can get away with it.”

As we talk, she reveals a little of the troubled upbringing that informs some of her lyrics: “I’ve seen domestic violence growing up with my mum. My best friend committed suicide. I’ve been through a lot of negatives, but you can turn them into positives depending on how you focus the lens, your view of life.”

She recently signed to Atlantic Records, and although her album isn’t due until next year, she has toured with other acts. She talks about the need for a “work ethic” and how “I never get to party - but it’s my own choice”

I also meet Wiley, the east London producer and MC known as the godfather of grime. As he laughs, his gold tooth glistens in the darkness.

Wiley hails from Bow, which I visit because it is the place grime began. Soon after leaving the Tube station I’m hailed by a man with a vicious-looking scar running the length of his face who tries to sell me a plasma-screen television. Welcome to east London.

Nearby stands a trio of 25-storey tower blocks, known locally as “Three Flats”. This was a landmark for anyone involved in grime’s early days, long before it began orbiting fluffy Planet Pop.

Three Flats was a secret location of Rinse FM, now a legal broadcaster, which began life as a pirate station promoting grime and its more instrumental sibling, dubstep.

Several leading grime artists grew up in the vicinity, including Tinchy Stryder, whose aunt used to live in one of the three flats, and who began honing his MC skills on Rinse FM aged just 12.

Born Kwasi Danquah in Ghana 25 years ago, Tinchy moved with his family to London as a child and is now a successful pop star, music executive and entrepreneur.

His street-fashion line, Star in the Hood, is worn by Rihanna and is about to launch internationally. He, too, talks a lot about “graft” and “hard work” - he has been plugging away for 13 years, more than half his life.

He has released three albums, with a fourth on the way, had two No 1 singles and, like many East End boys done good, lives in Essex and drives a BMW. He still spends a lot of time in Bow seeing friends and family.

He picks me up around the corner from Three Flats and we sit in his car to talk. With him is his friend and collaborator Dirty Danger - David to his mum - an MC and producer who still lives in Bow, a circumstance highlighted by his own T-shirt slogan: “I ain’t rich yet”.

They reminisce about how pirate radio raised Tinchy’s profile enough for him to press 1,000 singles at a time, at a vinyl plant in Tottenham. He would sell them to independent record shops to make a few hundred pounds’ profit.

This was before the internet took over. Tinchy, still a schoolboy, would spend the money on “trainers and clothes”, which, he admits, was the extent of his teenage ambition.

“You’d watch P Diddy videos at home, but you didn’t feel like that was somewhere you could get to,” says Tinchy.

But now with a string of top 10 hits to his name, he must feeling closer.